This article is based on reporting originally published by pipelinepub.com and draws on commentary from Verizon’s director of global technology services, Ross Clanton.
DevOps Arrives in the Telco World
The rise of DevOps—the collaborative union of development, operations, and quality assurance teams aimed at delivering products and services faster and more reliably—has been one of the defining shifts in enterprise technology over the past decade. Yet its adoption is uneven, and nowhere is that tension more visible than in the communications service provider (CSP) industry.
Telecommunications companies operate some of the most complex technology estates on the planet. Legacy network infrastructure, strict regulatory requirements, and enormous organizational scale have historically made CSPs resistant to the kind of rapid iteration that DevOps promises. And yet several of the world’s largest carriers are now deep into DevOps transformations—with measurable results.
Adoption Is Real, But It Takes Time
DevOps is not a switch that gets flipped. Analytics firm Logz.io’s DevOps Pulse 2017 survey of approximately 700 technology companies found that roughly half had either not fully implemented DevOps or had only done so within the previous year. Among those that had implemented it, 42 percent reported that the process took more than a year to complete.
This matters because one of the core promises of DevOps is faster time-to-market. The irony is that getting there is itself a slow process. Cultural change, toolchain selection, team restructuring, and workflow redesign all take sustained investment before they pay off.
What Major Carriers Are Actually Doing
Several of the largest U.S. carriers have publicly committed to DevOps at scale:
- AT&T drew significant industry attention when it made DevOps a central pillar of its network modernization strategy, aiming to reduce reliance on proprietary hardware and move toward software-defined infrastructure.
- T-Mobile embedded DevOps principles into its broader “Un-Carrier” philosophy, treating deployment speed as a competitive differentiator in product launches and customer-facing features.
- Verizon has pursued DevOps adoption across a large number of internal engineering teams, framing it explicitly as an enabler of business agility.
Ross Clanton, then director of global technology services at Verizon, put the business case plainly:
“At the end of the day it’s about enabling business agility by improving time to value. Getting from business ideas to prioritizing, designing, building and delivering those ideas so they add value to customers as quickly as possible is really what it’s all about.”
Ross Clanton, Director of Global Technology Services, Verizon
Scale: Over 1,000 Teams at a Single Carrier
A common criticism of DevOps in large enterprises is that it works beautifully in small, autonomous product teams but breaks down when applied at enterprise scale. Clanton pushed back against this directly, citing Verizon’s internal numbers:
“We have over 1,000 teams at Verizon practicing DevOps to some degree. These teams have all seen significant improvements in their deployment frequency and overall time to value, with most able to deploy/release changes to their applications weekly or even daily.”
Ross Clanton, Verizon
Weekly or daily deployments represent a significant shift for an industry where release cycles historically spanned months. The goal is continuous integration, delivery, and deployment—what practitioners often call “continuous everything.”
Complexity Is a Reason To Adopt DevOps, Not Avoid It
One of the most persistent objections to DevOps in the CSP context is the sheer complexity of telecommunications networks—legacy switching systems, real-time traffic management, multi-vendor hardware ecosystems, and interdependencies that span decades of incremental build-out.
Clanton’s counterargument is that this complexity is precisely why DevOps practices are necessary, not why they should be avoided. Highly complex systems benefit most from disciplined automation, clear ownership, rapid feedback loops, and observable deployments—all of which are foundational DevOps practices.
This perspective is supported by the broader industry context. As noted in the Ericsson Technology Review, the DevOps approach directly addresses the competing demands of rapid change and system stability—a balance that is particularly critical for 5G rollout, where ultra-low latency, massive device density, and high reliability requirements must coexist with the need to iterate quickly on services and network slices.
Culture Is the Hardest Part—and It Isn’t Unique to Telco
DevOps is as much an organizational philosophy as a technical practice. Large telecommunications companies are not typically celebrated for their cultural agility, which raises a legitimate question: can organizations of this scale and heritage genuinely adopt the collaborative, iterative, blame-free culture that DevOps requires?
“Culture is the most important aspect of DevOps transformation, but I don’t think cultural challenges are unique to CSPs. Verizon absolutely has the desire to make DevOps work at a large scale and we are investing in the cultural changes needed to ensure it is successful.”
Ross Clanton, Verizon
Clanton described Verizon’s cultural investment as including both internal engineering community events and external collaboration efforts designed to build cross-functional relationships and encourage horizontal knowledge sharing across the organization. This kind of deliberate community-building is a recognized pattern in large-scale DevOps transformations: without it, DevOps tends to remain siloed in individual teams rather than propagating across the enterprise.
Automation: The Most Tangible Win
While cultural transformation is the long game, automation delivers nearer-term value. Don Jones of Pluralsight described “obsessive automation” as one of the clearest signs of a genuine DevOps team:
“They know that the job of DevOps is to provide the smoothest, safest, fastest and most reliable path between the developers’ keyboards and a production deployment, so that each new coding sprint can quickly result in a tested production deployment.”
Don Jones, Pluralsight
In a CSP context, this translates to automating processes across the software delivery pipeline: automated testing, infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, deployment pipelines, and rollback procedures. Each of these has standalone value—even organizations that never complete a full cultural DevOps transformation can capture meaningful efficiency gains simply by automating previously manual steps.
This is an important practical point: you don’t have to wait for culture change to get value from automation. The pipeline improvements compound over time, reduce human error, and create the feedback loops that help teams move faster with confidence.
What This Means for 5G and Beyond
The stakes of this transformation are rising. As CSPs build out 5G infrastructure and begin delivering network-slicing, edge compute, and virtualized network functions as services, the pressure to iterate on software quickly—while maintaining carrier-grade reliability—will only intensify.
DevOps practices, including continuous delivery, automated testing at scale, and observable distributed systems, are not optional extras in this environment. They are prerequisites for managing the operational complexity that 5G introduces.
The job market reflects this reality. Engineering roles combining deep network knowledge with DevOps toolchain expertise—CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, observability platforms—have become standard listings at major carriers worldwide.
Key Takeaways for Practitioners
- Complexity is not a blocker. The scale and complexity of telco environments make DevOps harder, but also more valuable. Start with automation on the highest-friction parts of your delivery pipeline.
- Culture change is mandatory, not optional. Tooling without cultural alignment produces islands of productivity, not enterprise-wide transformation.
- Full implementation takes time. Budget more than a year for meaningful DevOps adoption across a large organization. Set milestones around deployment frequency and mean time to recovery (MTTR), not just toolchain adoption.
- Automation delivers value independently. Even partial DevOps adoption with strong automation practices yields measurable efficiency gains.
- 5G raises the stakes. The operational demands of 5G make DevOps competency a strategic requirement, not a nice-to-have.